(A farewell to the house on Elsmere Avenue) They pave over memories in a city built of spare engine parts seeping an oily kind of motor city madness; they've got scrapyards for that kind of thing, and just off Erie Street the boot is moving on too, the footprint it leaves behind is hidden beneath the asphalt that is hidden beneath the tires that are hidden beneath the cars driven by Detroit yuppies come to soak up some of that true immigrant flavour – somewhere with all the colour of Puzo but none of the blood, no sauce... And we're not like that, not some gangster family going to the mattresses to fight off the thugs of time, we can't scare them, Black Hand's gone pale; we're not even Sicilian And right now I'm staring at picture of her, she's the shadow in the corner of the basement, just a wisp, a tracer in the naked light of a bare bulb that dangles over the smooth round edges of a white stove that was new 50 years ago, hangs over the rusty smear of a rug woven to resemble floor tiles, over a stout table that once cradled endless miles of pasta rolled out and cut into ravioli And she's just a shadow in the corner, angel in the darkness, she bled that house, birthed it but that corner of the basement with its peeling aqua paint and the stove and the stout table, that's her too, tore it from her own body and planted it off Erie Street still reeking of garlic and the womb, and just as she moulded that house from her own meat, that house moulded her too, sheltered her, and they loved each other long after He had died and left her all alone in the neighbourhood And now they are tearing another lover away from her, but this time there will be no funeral, no wailing graveside just a bulldozer and a city inspector making sure those scattered pieces of her, that first scattering of New World dirt that was truly theirs, makes it safely into a coffin shaped suspiciously like a dumpster So this is the funeral, this is the goodbye And I am writing these lines a thousand miles away from there but small bits of me are breaking off and falling to the carpet and they kind of sparkle as they drift and flit and get caught in the wind of a goodbye and are sent whirling out into the flashing dark, to spin and change and liquify into tiny droplets of memory that I've sprinkled like holy water into every corner of that house, I've made of it a talisman, a fetish a pale reminder of all that is gone and fading A piece of me will be buried beneath Elsmere Avenue beside a piece of her it only bled a little as I cut it out of me and planted it there, still reeking of garlic and the womb.
